


Things We Share

by SylvanWitch



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Movie, Rape Recovery, rape (offstage)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-19
Updated: 2013-02-19
Packaged: 2017-11-29 19:27:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/690578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not like he hasn’t been hurt like this before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things We Share

**Author's Note:**

> The rape happens before the story begins. There is no graphic depiction of the assault, but there are references to injuries sustained during the assault and to the feeling of being restrained and helpless. There are also references to some of the common effects of Post Traumatic Stress, including anxiety, night terrors, insomnia, touch-aversion, and paranoia. Please be advised that there might be triggers in this story.

Natasha finds him in the bunker, but that’s alright.  That’s fine.  She’s safe.

 

Theirs is an intimacy of evasion.

 

She undoes the leather cuffs around his wrists, ignores the angry chafed skin in favor of releasing his ankles from the straps there.  Gives him the dignity of her back as he pushes himself up on shaking knees and elbows, levers himself gingerly onto his ass, wincing as it takes his weight.

 

Jumps from the table, wobbling, straining for balance, until a hand on his elbow steadies him and he says, “Thanks,” without looking at her.

 

Natasha, mercifully, says nothing.

 

He dresses as swiftly as he can, hearing boots thudding dully in the corridor down the way, afraid at any moment someone else will enter, will see.

 

Natasha speaks into her comm, hands him an earbud and a gun, says, “We’ve got to go.”  She doesn’t ask him if he can run, just jogs away, long legs eating the ground, and he keeps up, puts the pain out of his head, assesses as he moves how badly he might actually be hurt.

 

He doesn’t think there’s internal bleeding.

 

The team is already aboard the Quinjet.  Natasha takes her place in the pilot’s seat, Cap sketching a wave over his shoulder from the co-pilot’s chair. Tony says, “You okay?” and accepts his nod.  Bruce’s eyes are searching, but he says nothing.

  
Thor slaps his shoulder and Clint nearly comes out of his skin.

 

“Easy there,” Bruce says, but Clint pretends he’s talking to Thor and not to him.

 

He’s relieved beyond words that Phil isn’t with them, but he hears the familiar voice in his ear saying, “Everybody in one piece?” He’s talking to Clint, but they all answer.

 

Clint hides the way sitting makes it feel like he’s passing broken glass and gives them all his usual smirk, or as close as he can come to it.  If it’s a little stretched at the edges, only Natasha notices, and he knows his secrets are safe with her.

 

In medical, they look him over, clean and treat the abrasions where the restraints had rubbed, ask him questions about other injuries, which he answers with facile lies that glide easily off his tongue.  The last thing he wants is this in his record.  He’s had enough of being compromised, of evil getting inside of him.

 

He skates a glance at the paper covering the examining table and is relieved to see no evidence of bleeding.

 

Phil is waiting outside, and he falters, startled into gracelessness, having to catch himself from listing into the wall.  

 

Nothing shows on Phil’s face, of course, but Clint’s pretty good at reading him, and he sees the worry etched at the corners of his eyes.

 

“I’m good.  I’m fine,” he says, brazening out a smile.  Phil won’t risk a touch in this public a place, and Clint is relieved and then angry at the relief.  He should _want_ to be touched.  This is Phil.  Phil, whose pseudo-miraculous resurrection from the dead had broken Clint’s resolve and finally— _finally_ —brought them together.

 

It’s still too new, though, this thing between them.  They’d only just gotten past Clint’s guilt at being taken by Loki, only just sifted through the wreckage of his memories and the messy baggage of his past to find a place that belongs to both of them, exclusive of their history.

 

He won’t bring what happened in the bunker into their new, safe place.

 

Also, he feels dirty and has to keep telling himself that no one can smell it on him.

 

“Debrief’s in half an hour,” Phil says, but there’s too much of a question in it, and Phil never sounds uncertain when he’s giving an order.

 

Clint nods and smirks and walks away, putting a spring in his step that sets up a steady, cramping throb in his lower back.

 

In his quarters, he showers, but he’s careful about the heat of the water, knows not to scald himself, to show up red-skinned and red-eyed at the debriefing.  This isn’t his first rodeo, not by a long shot.

 

Or maybe he should say circus, since that’s where he’d first been introduced to these particular sensations.

 

The debriefing is short, his part necessarily brief.  He’d been plucked off his rooftop perch during an op they’d later figured out was a diversion designed so that the enemy could snatch Hawkeye, who as the most vulnerable member of the group seemed the likeliest target for interrogation.

 

He’d lost track of time in the bunker, but though it had felt endless, he’s not surprised to learn he’d only been there for sixteen hours.

 

 _Hardly enough time to be tortured properly_ , he imagines them thinking, and then he recognizes that he’s being both paranoid and unfair.

 

“Phil tracked them,” Cap says, and Clint smiles a little to see Phil color under Steve’s approving gaze.  There’s something pure about the way Phil admires Cap, even after all this time as a team.  It’s not that Phil doesn’t know Steve has flaws; it’s that he can see the overwhelming goodness in the man even despite his all-too-human moments.

 

In fact, it’s a characteristic of Phil that Clint admires and is grateful for.  It’s what he figures allows Phil to put up with him.

 

“Bruce got us in,” Cap continues.

 

“And we took care of them,” Tony finishes, a carnivorous smile suggesting that he might have taken Clint’s abduction personally.

 

Natasha contributes her report in clipped syllables, carefully omitting the condition in which she’d found Clint.

 

“It’s only a shame,” Phil finishes up, “that none of them were left alive.  No one wanted to surrender, huh?”  His innocent act is lost on no one; even Cap understands that Phil isn’t really taking them to task for killing everyone in the group that had snatched their archer from his perch.

 

It gives Clint a warm feeling in the region of his heart, makes him have to swallow back an uncharacteristic lump in his throat.  He doesn’t usually get sentimental about rescue.

 

Still…

 

“Nothing says you love me like annihilating my enemies,” Clint observes with a wry grin he pulls up from that warm place.

 

After that, they scatter, each to his or her own preferred method of unwinding after an op.  At the door, Phil stops him with a hand on his arm, and Clint doesn’t shiver under the touch, doesn’t shy away.  He was expecting this, Phil’s concern, his desire to put hands on him, to make sure he’s really okay.

 

“I’m fine,” he says warmly, and it’s not really a lie.  An evasion, maybe, or maybe an omission.  But not really a lie.  He’ll be fine.  He knows how this goes.  

 

“You sure?” Phil asks, brushing a finger under the cuff of the Henley Clint had shrugged into, not so much cold as having wanted to hide the evidence of his ordeal.  The pressure isn’t enough to cause him any pain beneath the gauze the nurse had applied over the antibiotic salve, but Clint pretends that the coldness in his ribcage and the swimming feeling in his stomach are put there by pain.

 

He draws his wrist away slowly, nods, takes Phil’s hand in his and squeezes.  “I’m fine, boss.”

 

“I would’ve come on the op, but it made more sense for me to command from here.”

 

“I know,” Clint answers, meaning it.  He’s never happy when Phil puts himself in harm’s way on Clint’s behalf, and he’s doubly happy that Phil wasn’t in that bunker.  “It’s fine.”

 

Phil’s expression suggests he doesn’t believe Clint, so Clint leans in closer, whispers, “I knew you’d find me,” lets his lips brush the skin along Phil’s temple.

 

Phil nods, a motion Clint can feel like a ghost touch along his cheek.  It makes him shudder, which Phil must take for desire because when he steps back and reclaims his hand from Clint’s, there’s a heat in his eyes that is unmistakable.

 

“We’ll talk later?”

 

Later, as it turns out, isn’t for three days.

  
Fury sends Phil to Columbia as an emergency replacement for a handler who’d been running a sensitive cartel op there until she’d disappeared mysteriously while en route to a meeting with her CI.

 

Clint spends the time alternately worrying about Phil’s safety and trying to steady himself through the worst of the shakes and night terrors.  Natasha isn’t clingy—that word doesn’t exist in her poly-lingual vocabulary—but she keeps an eye on him in a way that lets Clint know she’s doing it.

 

He nods to her as he passes her on the way to the range, lets her throw him around the gym for a few sessions, even shares a couple of late-night snacks with her when his dreams have him up.  Why she’s in the communal kitchen in the middle of the night, he doesn’t ask, and for the favor, she likewise keeps her questions to herself.

 

Otherwise, he sees little of the rest of the team.  Thor is in Asgard for some feast or other, and Tony and Bruce are blessedly preoccupied with something in the robotics lab.  Steve keeps to a soldier’s routine, so it’s easy to avoid him, and Clint finds himself mostly alone.

 

He also stays out of the vents.  For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t find their close spaces conducive to peace; instead, he feels cramped, claustrophobic.

 

On the day Clint takes his bandages off, pink skin healing nicely, Phil returns from Columbia looking tired and grim, white at the edge of his lips from the tight way he’s holding his mouth, and Clint knows it was a bad op.

 

From the way Phil moves into his arms when he comes back to their shared suite in the tower and holds on, breathing against Clint’s neck, he knows it was a really bad op.

 

He doesn’t ask, and Phil doesn’t tell—it’s one of the ways they make the relationship work—and after Phil’s shower and a shared, simple meal, they retire to the bedroom.

 

Sometimes after a mission, when they’re both exhausted beyond sleeping with adrenaline shakes and brittle-eyed vigilance, they’ll shove each other around, strip roughly, bite and worry at exposed skin, thrust against each other until they’re a sweaty mess and the worst of the nervous energy has burned off.

 

But sometimes, when the mission has gone wrong, when someone’s gotten hurt or killed or they’ve failed in a vital objective, they’ll rest side by side on their backs, touching at shoulder, at hip, near ankles tangled, and listen to each other breathe, too far inside themselves to offer each other comfort, too deep in internal darkness to let it out with any kind of real touch.

 

This time, Clint can see Phil cycling through the operation behind his eyes, the way his gaze goes distant, finding options that might have been taken, contingencies that should have been made.

 

He’s eating away at himself on the conditionals, and Clint knows he needs to bring Phil out of that ugly place.

 

He’s just not sure that he can.  

 

Clint’s been here before, touch-averse and skin-shy, knowing that the hand against his neck isn’t going to force him to open wide and take it, that the hand on his thigh isn’t going to tug him roughly to hardness and use it as an excuse for cruel pleasures.

 

But knowing and feeling are two different things, and he can’t force his brain to get behind the idea of willingly entering into another’s space, even when that other is Phil, whom Clint loves, whom he ordinarily can’t get enough of.

 

Still, the haunted shadows around Phil’s eyes and the way he’s controlling his breathing so carefully, as if to fool them both into thinking he’s fine—Clint’s got to try.

 

So he rolls onto his side, propping his head on his elbow and resting his free hand over Phil’s heart, assured by the steadiness of it and by the rise and fall of his chest that Phil is here, truly, and that he’s okay.  He moves his thumb against the soft fabric of the tee-shirt Phil sleeps in, waiting to see if Phil will stop him.

 

Instead, Phil covers Clint’s hand with his own and meets his eyes, a warm look growing in them.

 

“You okay?” he asks Clint, and Clint snorts.

 

“Isn’t that my line?”

 

But Phil’s direct look is searching Clint’s face, uncomfortably close to an interrogation.  

 

“Fine, boss,” Clint chides him softly, leaning down to ghost a kiss along Phil’s jaw, hoping to distract him from further investigating Clint’s state of mind.

 

Phil’s thumb and finger ring the fading bruise around his wrist, then, catching and holding Clint in a loose, warm shackle that raises every hair on his body.  His breath freezes in his chest, throat catching, and he closes his eyes against the welling panic.

 

It’s Phil, he tells himself, feeling stupid, helpless, and hating it, hating that he can know it’s Phil and still react this way to an innocent touch.

 

 _Get the fuck over it_ , he orders himself sternly, opening his eyes and fixing them on Phil’s fingers, suiting sight to understanding, willing his brain to accept that there’s no threat here.

 

“Want to tell me about it?” Phil asks, and there’s a caution in his tone that hurts Clint to hear, as if Phil isn’t quite sure he’s allowed to ask.

 

Clint drops his head against Phil’s shoulder, breathing in his scent, comforted by the solid muscle and bone of him.  Phil releases his wrist, and Clint lets out a long breath that shudders as it goes, filling the room with a sound too close to desperate for his comfort.

  
He’s not some wilting fucking wallflower.  He’s a trained agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and a motherfucking Avenger, for Christ’s sake.  And it’s not like he hasn’t been hurt like this before.  

 

It is, however, the first time he’s had someone to share it with.

Gathering his courage, he raises his head and meets Phil’s eyes.

 

“There’s nothing much to tell,” he says, and it might seem like a lie, except for the way that his eyes will Phil to see and know.  “They didn’t hurt me much.”  He pauses, the silence stretching between them.  “He didn’t. Much.”

 

Phil nods, eyes sad and knowing, and lays his hand once more against Clint’s where it still rests over Phil’s beating heart.

 

“It’s not your fault,” might be predictable—and it might not be something Clint needs to hear, because he knows that, knows it isn’t his fault that he was captured and drugged and bound hands and feet and left to the questionable mercies of his rapist—but it still makes him have to swallow hard when Phil says it, looking directly into his eyes, making Clint own the words.

  
He nods.  “I know that.”  

 

Phil’s answering nod, just a dip of his chin, puts that issue to rest between them.

 

Phil’s thumb moves idly over the back of Clint’s hand, just a light, steady brush of warm skin against warm skin.  His thumb is callused from hard duty, and it drags a little, a roughness that raises a shiver in Clint, but of the good kind.

 

“You’re not alone,” Phil says an infinity later, his motions having lulled Clint into a half-doze.  It’s warm here in their bed and comfortable, Phil’s even breathing reassuring, the motion of his thumb metronomic, setting a lazy pace.

 

“I know that, too,” Clint answers, giving a sleepy smile.  He’s wondering if he can sleep now, if maybe he’ll sleep, and with a guilty start it occurs to him that tonight was supposed to be about comforting Phil.

 

“Hey, you aren’t either,” he offers then, “Alone, I mean,” adding pressure to the place where his hand keeps the measure of Phil’s breathing.

 

“I know,” it’s Phil’s turn to answer, “But that’s not what I meant.”

 

And something in the way Phil says it dispels Clint’s reverie with a snap as of a safety being thumbed off.  He fixes his eyes on Phil’s too-serious face, searching his expression, hoping he’s got the meaning wrong.

 

Phil nods when he sees Clint get it, sees him understand that Phil has been where Clint is now, has had his own nightmares about being held in place and taken.

 

“Afghanistan?” Clint roughs out around the tightness in his throat.  He hates the sickness creeping up from his gut, the sour wash of it on the back of his tongue.  Hates that anyone could have hurt Phil like that.

 

“Second tour,” Phil affirms.  “I was captured after a night jump went bad, held for five months in a cave there until I managed to escape.”

 

The matter-of-fact delivery, the even tone, doesn’t disguise from Clint the gravity of Phil’s revelation.  It’s obvious this isn’t something Phil shares with many people.

 

“I’ve often thought of talking to Tony about it, actually.  The cave part, not the other,” Phil clarifies.  “But,” he shrugs, a motion Clint feels through his own arm and shoulder.  “I didn’t want it to lead to uncomfortable questions.”

 

Clint doesn’t want to ask one of his own, but he can’t help it.  “Do you think he—?”  He leaves it there.

 

Another shrug answers.  “It might explain some things about our resident playboy.”

 

Clint understands.  “After the first time, in the circus…”  He shakes his head, giving those memories a wide berth.  “Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly a monk.”

 

Of course, Phil knows about the first time.  It was all in his file.  They’d discussed it obliquely, Phil wanting to be sure Clint was okay with certain things, Clint wanting Phil to have all of him, not just the undamaged parts.

 

Now…

 

“I _will_ be fine,” Clint says then, waiting for Phil’s expression to reflect his understanding of what Clint means.

 

Phil squeezes Clint’s hand once, and then releases it, instead raising his hand slowly, asking for permission, which Clint gives, dropping his head so that Phil can cup his cheek, stroke that caressing thumb over his face, gentle him into a lingering kiss that doesn’t grow in passion but also doesn’t lack for heat.

 

“Can you sleep?” 

 

That Phil knows to ask spreads a liquid heat behind Clint’s ribs and makes him have to close his eyes against the feeling growing there.  

 

He nods, gruffs out a, “Yeah, I think so,” and lets Phil pull him down against his chest.  

 

They don’t usually cuddle, not even post-coitally.  The engrained habit of years of field work has imprinted on muscle memory the need for a clear reach to the gun beneath the pillow, the knife tucked between mattress and box spring, space to roll out of the way of a bullet or dive clear of an explosion on the street outside.

 

Clint makes an exception, though, feeling the strength in Phil’s embrace, the solidity of his chest beneath Clint’s temple and the lulling comfort of Phil’s fingers moving slowly through his hair.

 

“I love you,” he murmurs against the promise of Phil’s presence.

 

Phil’s arm tightens, his fingers ghosting over Clint’s forehead.

 

“I love you,” Clint hears just before sleep wraps him up and takes him down.


End file.
